Same Place, Same Things

by Tim Gautreaux

  She was a nurturer and felt that this quality, better than any man’s mechanical ability, would help her bring life to the fields of her farm. She saw a likeness between caring for a home and children and raising millions of soybeans. In her blood was a drive for generation more powerful than muscle and bone. This drive would make her a farmer.

  Elaine hoped that her husband would see the tractor stalled out and would bring her some tools. His back was hurting, and he had little to do but watch out the kitchen window or endure Lyndon Johnson talking on television about the war. A half hour after the engine died, she saw his green truck bobbing toward her very slowly across the unplowed portion of field.

  “Either you’re out of gas or the engine sucked up a charge of water,” he said, handing her a small toolbox through the truck window. He was tanned, clean-shaven, and strong-looking, but he winced when he raised the box up to her hands.

  “Stay in the truck,” she said.

  “I plan to. The ride out here’s awful rough.” He ran his hand through his dark, graying curls. “You know what to do?” He asked in a way that pleaded that she did.

  “Yes. I’ve got plenty gas. It’s water, I’m sure. You stay put.” She fixed him with a worried stare and plucked at her checked cotton blouse, which clung to her back in the heat.

  Her husband blinked and rested his forearms on top of the steering wheel. “I’m sorry that you’ve got to do this. I’ll be better in a month or so.”

  She gave him a smile as she pulled a pair of slip-joint pliers from the box. “Joe told me how to do this. I suppose you taught him somewhere along the line.”

  His eyes scanned the farm. “It’s amazing how much he did around here.”

  Elaine did not answer. There was nothing to say that they did not already feel in their blood about an eighteen-year-old son who was healthy one week, plowing and fixing things, and dead the next from encephalitis. They refused to reminisce, but they talked around their son at mealtime, as though he were at the table and they were ignoring him. When they touched in any way, the message of him was on their skin, and they knew their loss. Talking could not encompass what had gone from them.

  They had brought up two girls, now married and raising families in other towns, good girls, who visited. But it was to have been Joe’s farm.

  She made a face as she pulled the bowl of the water trap off the fuel line, spilling cold gasoline into her hands. The smell would stay in the cracks of her skin for hours, like a bad memory. Working carefully in the sun, she heard the truck start and turn for the house. She took a part out of the carburetor, cleared it of water, and put everything together, opening the gas valve once more, only to discover a leak. Twenty minutes passed before she had the tractor ready to run. Wiping her hands, she heard at the periphery of her attention the steady chop of a helicopter in the distance, a common sound in this part of the parish because of an air-training facility across the line in Mississippi. She mounted the tractor, pulled out the choke, and, with a finger in the starter ring, paused to look toward a helicopter that was passing closer than usual. A gunship, armed and camouflaged, skirted the edge of her field. It hovered a moment, approached with a whopping roar, and finally settled down in a circular dust storm seventy yards from her. She held her straw hat over her brown hair, glad at least that the machine had lit in an unplowed section. Only one person sat in the glassed-in cabin, and he watched her carefully. The pilot’s stare made her uneasy. She had imagined military folk to be generally on the move, having no time for meditation. Also, something was unorthodox about the pilot’s size. He appeared too small; his headphones were like cantaloupe halves clapped to his ears. He was rather dark.

  After a while he kicked open a door and jumped out, the huge blades dying in speed above him. Jogging across the field in loose combat fatigues, his pistol holster flying out from his side with each leap over the bumpy soil, he trailed a partially unfolded map. Elaine squinted and saw that he was Asian and very young, maybe twenty.

  “Hello,” he said, smiling mightily. “Can you be of assistance?”

  She glanced at the helicopter, wondering briefly if he had somehow stolen it. “What’s wrong? You have engine trouble, too?” she asked, pointing down at the tractor.

  “No, no,” he said, smiling so that his face seemed ready to split. He seemed desperately afraid that she would fear him. “I need advice.”

  She could see behind his smile and climbed down to the ground next to him. He was the size of a boy, his features rounded and new. “Advice about what?”

  “It is hard for me to ask,” he said, backing away, tilting his head to the left, to the right, almost crying through his grin. “I am lost.” He unfolded a map, placing it on the ground. “If you please could tell me where I am, I could get back to base. I am on my solo training flight and have hour to return.”

  She stooped and tried to study the map, but it contained no red-lined highways and town names like the filling station maps she was used to. It was lettered in a bizarre military code. She told him she could not make heads or tails of it. She was intelligent, and her father had sent her to college for two years, but she could not deal with a map that didn’t have Poireauville or Leroux spelled out on it. “I know where the fort is over the line in Mississippi, but I couldn’t tell you how to fly there. Why don’t we just give them a call and have an instructor come out to fly you back?”

  “No,” he wailed, his smile collapsing at last. Elaine thought of the pinched faces she saw on the newscasts in the evenings, the small people running from thatched houses, pillars of smoke in the background, the rattle of weapons. “If I fail at pilot school, I get sent back to Vietnam as foot soldier.” He turned to look longingly at his machine, as though already it had been taken from him.

  She stood and leaned against her tractor. “Your instructor would give you another chance, wouldn’t he?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “My instructor wants to see me dead in a rice paddy. He is a big American with red hair. Every day he tells me, ‘Le Ton, if you do not fly right, we send you home with a cheap rifle to fight VC.’”

  She studied him a while, looked back to the farmhouse and then to the map. Her husband could not read it, she knew. Joe probably could have.

  “Le Ton. Is that your name?”

  “Yes. I am from farmland, too.” He folded up his map slowly.

  “You flew out of Fort Exter?” The more she looked at him, the younger he appeared, some mother’s favorite, she guessed, noticing something in his eyes. Why else would he be trying so hard to stay alive?

  “That is so. I fly by map and directions given by my instructor at base. No radio.” His face darkened. “My instructor gives me bad directions.”

  “You have an hour left to get back?”

  He nodded. “Thank you for trying to help me.”

  She wiped her palms on her jeans. “I’ll tell you what, son. I can’t judge anything from that map, but if you take me up in that machine of yours, I might be able to show you where the fort is, and then you could drop me back off here. I don’t think it’s more than thirty miles or so.” She could hardly believe what she’d said. She might be doing something illegal or unpatriotic. He took to the idea instantly. “Ah, that would be good. I fly you a few miles outside of base and return here. Plenty time to get back to base.” She hung her straw hat on the breather pipe of the tractor and stepped over the big unplowed clods of earth to the gunship, climbing in next to him as he flipped overhead switches, manipulated foot pedals, and lifted hand levers at his side. The craft surged and vibrated like a toolshed in a tornado. In a moment they were whanging through the sky.

  “Go east,” she yelled. Elaine watched for the water tower in Poireauville but could hardly keep her eyes off the running fields below her feet, the sugarcane, bayous, levees, and willow brakes that flew by as in a dream or a wide-screened movie at a world’s fair. It was difficult to concentrate on any one landmark when the giant oaks and longleaf pines were
sailing just a few feet below. Le Ton glanced at her for direction. The water tower she saw in the distance had to be Poireauville’s, and she pointed toward it, but when the craft came within two miles of the round silver tank, she felt disoriented and panicky. It was too small to be Poireauville’s, too freshly painted. Le Ton flew a wide circle around it and she wished that all little towns still painted their names on the tanks as they had when she was a child.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  She scanned the ground. There were too many trees. Poireauville was a cut-over hamlet and did not support such a welter of sycamores. Perhaps they had veered a few miles northeast and were over Rodeaux. Looking to her left, she spotted a set of smokestacks and suddenly wished her husband was with her. An area man could look at a factory’s stack from three miles away and tell the type of mill, the name of the owner, and the ages of his children. But she was lost.

  She spotted a rusty thread of railroad and pointed down to it. “That’s the Missouri Pacific branch line. Follow it.” Her son had loved railroads and had shown her maps of the region’s lines enough times that she had a vague notion of where the local tracks went. Before he was old enough to drive, she would take him on long rides so he could take pictures of stations and engines. She remembered telling him that he should photograph people, not only objects. People are what have to be remembered. She looked down at an abandoned crossroads grocery, its windows boarded up. Places are nothing.

  Le Ton swirled above the railroad for six miles, looking down and then checking his compass. “Lady, we fly north? You are sure of the railroad?” He had lost his smile completely. His face shone with a nervous sweat. It worried her that he was more frightened than she was. Looking down, she thought that perhaps this was the old north track instead of the branch that led east. Everywhere were oaks and occasionally a flat field of sugarcane she did not recognize. She saw a barn she had never seen before, a large white home, and two rows of tenant houses. She felt like a child lost in a thousand acres of razor-leafed cane.

  “Go that way,” she yelled, pointing to her right. Studying the ground, she saw a cornfield slip under her and a tenant house that seemed to be empty, its iron roof bloody with rust. She was looking for a laundry line full of drying clothes, which would tell the presence of a woman. A full laundry line behind a house where the truck was gone would be a lucky find. She did not want to risk landing in the yard of a stiff-necked sharecropper who would call the sheriff before he heard her out.

  A weathered cypress house passed below, and she asked Le Ton for field glasses, which he produced from a rack under his seat. She focused on the backyard. A string of laundry danced on the line, but there were many cumbersome checkered shirts, and in the front yard, two trucks.

  A mile and a half across the field was a poorer house, the chimney broken at the top, the roof swaybacked. She motioned to it when she saw on its clothesline the wink of towels and sheets. She thought back to the days when she still hung out the wash, the clean damp smell of the pillowcases, and the breezy mornings her son chased his sisters through the laundry, the bright cotton licking their faces.

  Le Ton was shouting, “The house is behind. Keep going?”

  Looking back with the glasses, she saw no car and no electric meter on the wires leading along the side of the house. “Put down in the field across the road from that shack.” There was no need to soil the laundry.

  The helicopter descended slowly into a pasture as several bony, fly-bitten cows lurched away into a grove of wild plum trees. As the craft touched down, she looked across the gravel road to a porch where a stout black woman sat in a rocker and shaded her eyes.

  Le Ton stopped the engine. “Why do we stop here?” He looked around at the sickly fields and the paintless tenant shack.

  “I’ve got to ask directions from somebody who won’t call a newspaper.” She jumped to the ground and he followed her to the road, where she instructed him to wait.

  Once on the porch she sidestepped a gap in the flooring.

  “Don’t bust a leg,” the black woman sang, touching the kerchief that bound her hair. “My man supposed to fix that when he can find a right board.”

  “How you doing? I’m Elaine Campbell from down in Burkhalter community. Do you know where that is?”

  The other woman stood, adjusted her apron, and stared at the floor. “No, ma’am,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Well, of course I know where it is when I’m there. But this boy and I seem to be lost.”

  The black woman looked across the road at Le Ton, who stood like a frail post against the slack barbed wire. “How come you ain’t got on your uniform?”

  “I’m not in the army. He is. He got lost over my place in Burkhalter and I was trying to show him the way to Fort Exter when we got lost again.”

  “I don’t know where Burkhalter is.”

  “It’s not far from Poireauville.”

  “Law.” She sat down. “That’s twenty miles off with the crow. The roads don’t hardly run thataway.” She peered across the gravel lane again. “They left that little Chinaman run that big machine?”

  Elaine turned, looked at Le Ton, and grinned. “He’s on a training mission. If they find out at the fort that he got lost, they’ll send him back to Vietnam as a foot soldier. I’m just trying to help him out.”

  “Vietnam,” the other woman repeated. “I heard that word a lot. My onliest boy been sent over there. I got three girls, but only one boy. He use to be at Exter, too. Name’s Vergil Bankston.” She smiled as she said the name. “My name’s Mary Bankston.”

  Elaine sat in a straight back chair and motioned for Le Ton to cross the road.

  As he walked up to the porch, Mary Bankston examined him, then let out a gentle, high-pitched whine. “If he ain’t just a baby, though. Is all Vietnam peoples easy lost like you?”

  Le Ton smiled defensively, considering the question. He sat on the porch floor between the women, facing them, and folded his legs. “I am very stupid to Americans. Most trainees are farm people. We know how to plow with ox, how to use hoe.” He made a little hoeing movement with his arms. “It is very hard to learn vectors and compression ratios, how to make big, fast helicopters run right.” He looked from one woman’s face to the other. “My cousin, Tak Dok, came to fly Corsair airplanes. In training flight, his cockpit shield blows off and he radios back what happens. Man in the tower says land at once. Tak Dok brings his plane down in the field of corn and lands without much damage. Instructors send him back to be foot soldier because they mean for him to come back to his airfield to land at once.” He looked over his shoulder toward his craft. “Last month, Tak Dok is killed. My young cousin was a good pilot but could not always understand your way with words.”

  Mary Bankston passed a long mother’s look to Elaine, the expression a woman owns at night when she sits up listening to a child cough and rattle, knowing there is nothing she can do but act out of her best feelings. “I got a pot of hot water on the stove. I can drip coffee in a minute.” She smiled at Le Ton. “Got a tea bag somewhere, too.”

  “We don’t have a whole lot of time,” Elaine said, looking down on Le Ton’s camouflage cap. She pulled it off a moment to look at the thick, close-cropped hair and the young brassy skin at the roots. Everything about him was small and young, laden with possibilities. “Do you have any idea how far we are from the Mississippi line?”

  “You wants to go to Exter, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell him to fly straight east to that brand-new interstate about thirty miles, then take a right and follow it down to that big green sign what say Fort Exter.”

  Elaine placed her left palm on her forehead. “I should have remembered that. I’ve never been on it, but I knew it was there.”

  “Sure enough,” Mary Bankston said. “Even a farmer Chinaman can find a four-lane highway. I been on it twice to go see Vergil.”

  Elaine returned Le Ton’s cap. “Didn’t you pass ove
r that interstate to get into this region?”

  He thought about this for a moment, and then with the expression of an old man wise to betrayal, he answered her. “Instructor says fly over Gulf and then come inland.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Mary Bankston offered to let them have two fried-apple pies for their trip, but they declined.

  “He ain’t never going to get no bigger if he don’t eat,” she yelled after them as they crossed the fence.

  Elaine called back. “Don’t tell anybody about us, especially your son.”

  She nodded from her paintless porch. “Who gonna believe me?”

  Le Ton started the engine and the big gunship whirled off into the sky. She looked below and saw the old railroad they had followed earlier. “Why aren’t you heading east? You could let me off on a highway outside of base, and I could figure a way to get home.”

  “That would not be right,” he said. “You have been too helpful. I should not put you out in the middle of a wilderness.” He glanced back to the tenant house, where Mary Bankston was probably watching him as she would a young child crossing the street. “I also have been on the big highway the black lady speaks of. I did not know it ran north-south. It is not on the map the instructor gives me.”

  With the field glasses, she found the correct water tower, a larger structure to the south emblazoned with SENIORS ’66, a spray-paint legend her son had helped create one moonless night. She remembered how Sammy, the local deputy, had caught him, bringing him to the house, revealing what her son had done, working a wink into his speech while Joe stood behind him in the front door, repentant and fearful.

  She had never told her husband. He wouldn’t have punished their son severely, but Elaine let her instinct to protect him overpower her need to discipline him. She had been so glad that he had been brought home safe. Now as the painted words swam in the field glasses, she couldn’t say whether she would ever tell her husband. She forced her eyes away, over to the highway, and in a minute found the blacktop that crawled to her farm. She had no idea that the place appeared so drowsy, the roofs tired with rust, the crystal green ponds oval like the sleepy eyes of children. Le Ton circled to the rear of the farm to avoid buzzing the house and set down where he had earlier.